#library

Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way." "How I got over ↗

— Darryl Pinckney

#library #love #love

But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did–he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve. As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way–like the moon. ↗

— Tao Lin

#shelving #change

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#library #life #little-room #loss #lost-opportunity

The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them. ↗

— Bruno Bettelheim

#books #children #desire #failure #fear

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear. ↗

— Claudia Gray

#books #evernight #library #age

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#climates #confined #democratic #free #how

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#children #drop #go #him #i

Why by a book when you can join a library. ↗

— Ricky Gervais

#join #library #why #you

Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained. ↗

— James Loeb

#copyright #could #efforts #excellence #existence

Library campaigners are not prepared to stand by and watch something they cherish be dismantled brick by brick. ↗

— Kate Mosse

#cherish #dismantled #library #prepared #something